Privacy Policy

The Australian Water Association is an organisation that is, by nature, personal information-intensive. We collect information from individuals so that we can provide you with our services, manage our relationship with you, communicate with you effectively and identify which of our services will best suit your needs. We have robust systems and procedures in place to protect your privacy whenever we collect, store, use or disclose your personal information.

What kind of personal information do we collect?

Personal information, including sensitive information, that the Australian Water Association collects and holds includes, but is not limited to:

Information from persons who participate in conferences or other events and programs.

How we collect your personal information

We collect most personal information direct from you, for example, when you fill in a registration form. Information may also be collected direct from you when you deal with us personally, over the telephone, send a letter, or visit the web site.

There may be occasions when a third party provides information about you.

How we use your personal information

We will use your personal information to provide you with a particular product or service and to contact you. This includes (but is not limited to) the following:

Event registration

Processing payments

We may use your personal information for purposes related or ancillary to the main reason we collect it, such as:

Internal accounting and administration.

Regulatory reporting and compliance.

Helping us to identify and inform you about other services that may be of benefit to you

As a not-for-profit organisation, the Australian Water Association needs to enter into sponsorship arrangements with third parties from time to time. When we enter a sponsorship agreement, we may use your personal information to provide you with information about products, services and promotions offered by our sponsors.

Disclosure of your personal information

We disclose a member's mailing details (i.e. name and address) to mailing houses for the purpose of mailing event information etc. In these situations, we prohibit the third parties from using personal information about you except for the specific purpose for which we supply it.

We treat all personal information held about you as confidential. This applies except where disclosure of your personal information is compelled by law, in the public interest, or with your consent.

Accuracy of your personal information

If we have accurate personal information about you, it enables us to provide you with the best possible service. We take reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date whenever we collect or use it.

If you find that the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, please contact us immediately. Alternatively, you may correct this yourself logging in to the website.

Security of your personal information

The Australian Water Association protects any personal information that we hold about you from misuse and loss. We protect your privacy by restricting access to your personal information to those staff or authorised office bearers who need it, either to process information or to provide you with membership services. Our staff and office bearers are responsible for handling personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act.

Your personal information may be stored as hardcopy documents, or as electronic data. We maintain physical security over our paper and electronic data stores and premises. We also maintain computer and network security. For example, we use firewalls (security measures for the Internet) and other security systems such as user identifiers and passwords to control access to computer systems.

The Australian Water Association will keep your information for as long as it is needed to provide you with the products and services you have requested from us. We will take reasonable steps to destroy or permanently de-identify personal information when we no longer need it.

Our online registration forms undergo extensive security testing by external professional companies to ensure your data is protected to the highest level against potential hacking. All data transmitted between web browsers and our online registrations are protected by encryption.

Google Analytics

The Association uses Google Analytics to collect traffic data for continually improving our website. Google Analytics traffic data is stored on Google servers (whether in the US or elsewhere) and Google is subject to US law.

Google Analytics does not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google or store any other information about your visit that may be used to identify you personally from records on Google servers. For more information about what data is collected, see the Google Analytics privacy policy.

To improve our website further, we use Google Analytics Demographic and Interest reporting. These reports associate your visit to our website with Google's estimated data about your age, gender and interest categories. This data is calculated by Google based on any accounts you have with Google products (such as YouTube), as well as your browsing behaviour on third party websites that use the DoubleClick cookie. This data is aggregated by Google Analytics and a privacy threshold is applied so that we cannot identify your demographics and interests on an individual basis.

The Association also uses the Google Analytics UserID feature. If you choose to identify yourself (eg. by registering or logging in as a member), we will associate your Australian Water Association member ID with your subsequent visits across multiple devices, as well as some internal customer information. All of this associated data is not Personally Identifiable Information, meaning that your private data (eg. email address, phone number, name etc.) are never stored on Google servers; all that's stored is an anonymised link to these records in our internal database. We follow Google's privacy requirements for UserID, including dissociating your UserID from future browsing if you choose to log out.

From time to time, the Association also uses Google remarketing and interest-based advertising to serve you ads (using Google and third party vendors) based on your demographics and your behaviour on our website. Any advertising or remarketing lists you may belong to are also subject to Google's privacy thresholds. We cannot serve you ads based on any personally-identifiable information (or any sensitive information) and the ad serving cannot be used to individually target any ads to a particular person. For more information, see Google's policy for advertising based on interests and location.

A range of opt-out actions you can take is outlined below:

To remove yourself from a remarketing list or do dissociate your UserID from future browsing, clear your browser cookies

To opt out of your usage data being reported to Google Analytics for this website, refuse or clear the relevant first party cookies (called _ga and _gat) associated with this website.

To completely opt out of your usage data being reported in Google Analytics for any website, install Google's official opt-out browser add-on

Facebook

From time to time, the Association also uses the Facebook Pixel to serve you ads (using Facebook and third party vendors) based on your behaviour on this website. If you submit a form on the website we may also use this to serve you ads. Any advertising or remarketing lists you may belong to are also subject to Facebook's ad policies. We cannot serve you ads based on any personally-identifiable information (or any sensitive information) and the ad serving cannot be used to individually target any ads to a particular person. The data collected is stored on Facebook's servers (whether in the US or elsewhere) and Facebook is subject to US law. To opt out of this advertising, visit aboutads.info/choices/.

For any further information about the Association's privacy policy contact Stefanie Moebus.